Financial Distress Prediction For Small And Medium Enterprises Using Machine Learning Techniques

Financial Distress Prediction plays a crucial role in the economy by accurately forecasting the number and probability of failing structures, providing insight into the growth and stability of a country's economy. However, predicting financial distress for Small and Medium Enterprises is challenging due to their inherent ambiguity, leading to increased funding costs and decreased chances of receiving funds. While several strategies have been developed for effective FCP, their implementation, accuracy, and data security fall short of practical applications. Additionally, many of these strategies perform well for a portion of the dataset but are not adaptable to various datasets. As a result, there is a need to develop a productive prediction model for better order execution and adaptability to different datasets. In this review, we propose a feature selection algorithm for FCP based on element credits and data source collection. Current financial distress prediction models rely mainly on financial statements and disregard the timeliness of organization tests. Therefore, we propose a corporate FCP model that better aligns with industry practice and incorporates the gathering of thin-head component analysis of financial data, corporate governance qualities, and market exchange data with a Relevant Vector Machine. Experimental results demonstrate that this strategy can improve the forecast efficiency of financial distress with fewer characteristic factors.

IMPORTANT-Net: Integrated MRI Multi-Parameter Reinforcement Fusion Generator with Attention Network for Synthesizing Absent Data

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is highly sensitive for lesion detection in the breasts. Sequences obtained with different settings can capture the specific characteristics of lesions. Such multi-parameter MRI information has been shown to improve radiologist performance in lesion classification, as well as improving the performance of artificial intelligence models in various tasks. However, obtaining multi-parameter MRI makes the examination costly in both financial and time perspectives, and there may be safety concerns for special populations, thus making acquisition of the full spectrum of MRI sequences less durable. In this study, different than naive input fusion or feature concatenation from existing MRI parameters, a novel $\textbf{I}$ntegrated MRI $\textbf{M}$ulti-$\textbf{P}$arameter reinf$\textbf{O}$rcement fusion generato$\textbf{R}$ wi$\textbf{T}$h $\textbf{A}$tte$\textbf{NT}$ion Network (IMPORTANT-Net) is developed to generate missing parameters. First, the parameter reconstruction module is used to encode and restore the existing MRI parameters to obtain the corresponding latent representation information at any scale level. Then the multi-parameter fusion with attention module enables the interaction of the encoded information from different parameters through a set of algorithmic strategies, and applies different weights to the information through the attention mechanism after information fusion to obtain refined representation information. Finally, a reinforcement fusion scheme embedded in a $V^{-}$-shape generation module is used to combine the hierarchical representations to generate the missing MRI parameter. Results showed that our IMPORTANT-Net is capable of generating missing MRI parameters and outperforms comparable state-of-the-art networks. Our code is available at https://github.com/Netherlands-Cancer-Institute/MRI_IMPORTANT_NET.

Synthesis-based Imaging-Differentiation Representation Learning for Multi-Sequence 3D/4D MRI

Multi-sequence MRIs can be necessary for reliable diagnosis in clinical practice due to the complimentary information within sequences. However, redundant information exists across sequences, which interferes with mining efficient representations by modern machine learning or deep learning models. To handle various clinical scenarios, we propose a sequence-to-sequence generation framework (Seq2Seq) for imaging-differentiation representation learning. In this study, not only do we propose arbitrary 3D/4D sequence generation within one model to generate any specified target sequence, but also we are able to rank the importance of each sequence based on a new metric estimating the difficulty of a sequence being generated. Furthermore, we also exploit the generation inability of the model to extract regions that contain unique information for each sequence. We conduct extensive experiments using three datasets including a toy dataset of 20,000 simulated subjects, a brain MRI dataset of 1,251 subjects, and a breast MRI dataset of 2,101 subjects, to demonstrate that (1) our proposed Seq2Seq is efficient and lightweight for complex clinical datasets and can achieve excellent image quality; (2) top-ranking sequences can be used to replace complete sequences with non-inferior performance; (3) combining MRI with our imaging-differentiation map leads to better performance in clinical tasks such as glioblastoma MGMT promoter methylation status prediction and breast cancer pathological complete response status prediction. Our code is available at https://github.com/fiy2W/mri_seq2seq.

Wormhole MAML: Meta-Learning in Glued Parameter Space

In this paper, we introduce a novel variation of model-agnostic meta-learning, where an extra multiplicative parameter is introduced in the inner-loop adaptation. Our variation creates a shortcut in the parameter space for the inner-loop adaptation and increases model expressivity in a highly controllable manner. We show both theoretically and numerically that our variation alleviates the problem of conflicting gradients and improves training dynamics. We conduct experiments on 3 distinctive problems, including a toy classification problem for threshold comparison, a regression problem for wavelet transform, and a classification problem on MNIST. We also discuss ways to generalize our method to a broader class of problems.

1st Place Solution for YouTubeVOS Challenge 2022: Referring Video Object Segmentation

The task of referring video object segmentation aims to segment the object in the frames of a given video to which the referring expressions refer. Previous methods adopt multi-stage approach and design complex pipelines to obtain promising results. Recently, the end-to-end method based on Transformer has proved its superiority. In this work, we draw on the advantages of the above methods to provide a simple and effective pipeline for RVOS. Firstly, We improve the state-of-the-art one-stage method ReferFormer to obtain mask sequences that are strongly correlated with language descriptions. Secondly, based on a reliable and high-quality keyframe, we leverage the superior performance of video object segmentation model to further enhance the quality and temporal consistency of the mask results. Our single model reaches 70.3 J &F on the Referring Youtube-VOS validation set and 63.0 on the test set. After ensemble, we achieve 64.1 on the final leaderboard, ranking 1st place on CVPR2022 Referring Youtube-VOS challenge. Code will be available at https://github.com/Zhiweihhh/cvpr2022-rvos-challenge.git.

Time-Varying ALIP Model and Robust Foot-Placement Control for Underactuated Bipedal Robot Walking on a Swaying Rigid Surface

Controller design for bipedal walking on dynamic rigid surfaces (DRSes), which are rigid surfaces moving in the inertial frame (e.g., ships and airplanes), remains largely uninvestigated. This paper introduces a hierarchical control approach that achieves stable underactuated bipedal robot walking on a horizontally oscillating DRS. The highest layer of our approach is a real-time motion planner that generates desired global behaviors (i.e., the center of mass trajectories and footstep locations) by stabilizing a reduced-order robot model. One key novelty of this layer is the derivation of the reduced-order model by analytically extending the angular momentum based linear inverted pendulum (ALIP) model from stationary to horizontally moving surfaces. The other novelty is the development of a discrete-time foot-placement controller that exponentially stabilizes the hybrid, linear, time-varying ALIP model. The middle layer of the proposed approach is a walking pattern generator that translates the desired global behaviors into the robot's full-body reference trajectories for all directly actuated degrees of freedom. The lowest layer is an input-output linearizing controller that exponentially tracks those full-body reference trajectories based on the full-order, hybrid, nonlinear robot dynamics. Simulations of planar underactuated bipedal walking on a swaying DRS confirm that the proposed framework ensures the walking stability under different DRS motions and gait types.

MFFN: Multi-view Feature Fusion Network for Camouflaged Object Detection

Recent research about camouflaged object detection (COD) aims to segment highly concealed objects hidden in complex surroundings. The tiny, fuzzy camouflaged objects result in visually indistinguishable properties. However, current single-view COD detectors are sensitive to background distractors. Therefore, blurred boundaries and variable shapes of the camouflaged objects are challenging to be fully captured with a single-view detector. To overcome these obstacles, we propose a behavior-inspired framework, called Multi-view Feature Fusion Network (MFFN), which mimics the human behaviors of finding indistinct objects in images, i.e., observing from multiple angles, distances, perspectives. Specifically, the key idea behind it is to generate multiple ways of observation (multi-view) by data augmentation and apply them as inputs. MFFN captures critical boundary and semantic information by comparing and fusing extracted multi-view features. In addition, our MFFN exploits the dependence and interaction between views and channels. Specifically, our methods leverage the complementary information between different views through a two-stage attention module called Co-attention of Multi-view (CAMV). And we design a local-overall module called Channel Fusion Unit (CFU) to explore the channel-wise contextual clues of diverse feature maps in an iterative manner. The experiment results show that our method performs favorably against existing state-of-the-art methods via training with the same data. The code will be available at https://github.com/dwardzheng/MFFN_COD.

MultiRoboLearn: An open-source Framework for Multi-robot Deep Reinforcement Learning

It is well known that it is difficult to have a reliable and robust framework to link multi-agent deep reinforcement learning algorithms with practical multi-robot applications. To fill this gap, we propose and build an open-source framework for multi-robot systems called MultiRoboLearn1. This framework builds a unified setup of simulation and real-world applications. It aims to provide standard, easy-to-use simulated scenarios that can also be easily deployed to real-world multi-robot environments. Also, the framework provides researchers with a benchmark system for comparing the performance of different reinforcement learning algorithms. We demonstrate the generality, scalability, and capability of the framework with two real-world scenarios2 using different types of multi-agent deep reinforcement learning algorithms in discrete and continuous action spaces.

Progressive Self-Distillation for Ground-to-Aerial Perception Knowledge Transfer

We study a practical yet hasn't been explored problem: how a drone can perceive in an environment from viewpoints of different flight heights. Unlike autonomous driving where the perception is always conducted from a ground viewpoint, a flying drone may flexibly change its flight height due to specific tasks, requiring capability for viewpoint invariant perception. To reduce the effort of annotation of flight data, we consider a ground-to-aerial knowledge distillation method while using only labeled data of ground viewpoint and unlabeled data of flying viewpoints. To this end, we propose a progressive semi-supervised learning framework which has four core components: a dense viewpoint sampling strategy that splits the range of vertical flight height into a set of small pieces with evenly-distributed intervals, and at each height we sample data from that viewpoint; the nearest neighbor pseudo-labeling that infers labels of the nearest neighbor viewpoint with a model learned on the preceding viewpoint; MixView that generates augmented images among different viewpoints to alleviate viewpoint difference; and a progressive distillation strategy to gradually learn until reaching the maximum flying height. We collect a synthesized dataset and a real-world dataset, and we perform extensive experiments to show that our method yields promising results for different flight heights.